Comment by pheon
13 years ago
that the full menu costs $300 and you will finish in 30min. also reviews of the his sons restaurant say they get angry if you dont eat everything...
13 years ago
that the full menu costs $300 and you will finish in 30min. also reviews of the his sons restaurant say they get angry if you dont eat everything...
Not finishing what you're served in Japan is, approximately, the same comment as a $0 tip is in America, except about food quality rather than service. Culturally, the act of not eating something prepared for you reads like "Your food is inedible and unfit for human consumption" rather than "I wasn't that hungry" or "This particular dish, well, I wasn't quite feeling it." This will generally not endear you to fancy chefs, although you might get a bit of leeway if you look obviously foreign.
(Japanese people get in trouble on the tip thing all the time in the US, so much so that my travel agent helpfully tried to instruct me on "peculiar customs of Americans" when selling me a ticket to my hometown.)
This might help explain a feature of Japanese restaurants in America, one that I actually quite like: They are unlikely to serve portions that will strain you if you attempt to eat them in one sitting.
To first order, in unsophisticated American restaurants, the culture emphasizes bulk: If a quarter-pound hamburger is good, half a pound is obviously better, and if the restaurant offers you free fries they'll be surprised if you say no, because, hey, free fries! They will of course happily offer you boxes to take food home (there are restaurants at which one order will feed you for three meals) but in general restaurant eating is a system for packing on pounds, unless you constantly focus on eating just a tiny portion of everything you're served, or you eat in teams of two or three and order strategically.
Presumably they cover this in all the good Japanese-language guides to the USA, because otherwise it must be really stressful to the poor tourist, confronted with a stack of pancakes that one can barely lift, let alone finish eating.
Japanese people get in trouble on the tip thing all the time in the US
I think it's not just Japan. Here in Sweden, tipping is done at times but it's certainly not something mandatory.
Please do educate me more on US tipping customs. I don't want to be a fool when I go there in future...
Simple: American service has a peculiar quirk in that servers are paid (in 95% of the country) around 2 dollars an hour, and are compensated in tips instead. At minimum, 15% is expected as a tip, even for bad service, and good service has an expectation of 20%. Truly bad service should be spoken to with the manager, rather than simply leaving without any tip.
Note that servers expect you to tell them if something is wrong, so that it can be corrected.
If you have a discount, you are still expected to tip on the full amount.
When you look at the price, add about 9% (depending on locale) for sales tax and another 15% on top of that for the tip. (Tip used to be pre-sales tax, but is considered post-sales tax today.)
Many people tip 20%, but it is not required. Fast food has no tipping. Starbucks and other coffee places, a tip is appreciated but not required. Bars expect a dollar per drink.
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At any sit-down restaurant, take the total at the bottom of the check, divide it by 10, and multiply it by 2. $15 check? $3 tip.
There's no other situation in the US where tipping is mandatory; tip the same way you would in Sweden. You probably want to tip valet parkers, but you don't absolutely have to.
They ask you in advance if there is something you don't like/are allergic to (my friend ate there), which isn't normal for omakase actually (I hate Uni, so this is a concern for me).
In the US, you are usually asked if there's anything you don't eat when ordering omakase (unless the chef knows you, in which case it's not an issue). Is that unusual elsewhere?
Not eating one piece of a $300 sushi meal would be like throwing out a whole plate at a pretty fancy restaurant... lots of chefs would be upset by that.